Ricerc@Sapienza

Review of James R. Cross, Hippocratic Oratory. The Poetics of Early Greek Medical Prose, Routledge: New York 2018, pp. IX + 159, ISBN 9781472474155.

The 14th century manuscript Urbinas gr. 68, which contains texts belonging to the Hippocratic Collection, appears to be a very interesting source for the history of late antique and middle byzantine exegetical activity on medical texts. Among the various scholia it preserves, I will analyze and contextualize in particular the scholion to the beginning of the Praecepta, transmitted only in this manuscript (ff. 26v-27r). In fact, this scholion-text constitutes a unique and precious testimony of the exegetical activity on the Hippocratic Praecepta.

Il volume si propone come un valido strumento per ricerche lessicali su quegli scritti medici appartenenti al grande e variegato insieme di opere chiamato Corpus Hippocraticum. L’analisi dei termini che ruotano intorno alla sfera della vita e della morte si rivela fondamentale per la lettura dei testi medici antichi e il volume di Gallego Pérez ha il merito di offrire un panorama completo dei loro significati e delle loro sfumature lessicali nelle occorrenze del Corpus Hippocraticum.

The paper explores the notion of divine and its relationship with medicine in the Hippocratic treatise Decorum, which deals with ethical rules for physicians. After a general overview about the interrelation between medicine and religion in the Hippocratic Collection as well as in Galen, I provide a complete analysis of two central chapters of Decorum. On the one hand, the author assimilates the ideal physician to a god through the sentence « the physician who is a philosopher is godlike » (chapter 5).

Die Untersuchung zum polysemen Begriff der charis in der antiken medizinischen Ethik steht im Zentrum des vorliegenden Aufsatzes. Nach einem Überblick über die verschiedenen Bedeutungen der charis in der griechischen und insbesondere medizinischen Literatur wird die Anwendung des Begriffs in zwei ethischen Schriften des Corpus Hippocraticum, De decenti habitu und Praecepta, analysiert. Die unterschiedlichen Bedeutungen des Wortes und anderer von ihm abgeleiteter Wörter werden hinsichtlich des Vorkommens und der jeweiligen Kontexte der hippokratischen Passagen untersucht.